No such thing as a free lesson

I'm sitting in a remodelled guitar shop plunking diffidently away on this second-hand instrument with a clear satin finish, when a very I'm-in-a-band guy - torn jeans, nice shirt, long bleached hair, fake tan - wanders in with a case on his back. He regards me critically, tosses his locks, and sets himself down with an amplifier across the shopfloor. Opening up his case to retrieve some sort of classically weird bass guitar with stripes and things on it, this guy sits back on a stool and starts - spookily - playing exactly the same things that I play, in unison, which is vaguely unsettling given that it's just a stream of consonant notes I'm more-or-less pulling out of my arse.

This comes to a halt after we both start grinning at each other helplessly.

"OK," I say, "What's the trick?"

"Oh, well," he says, uncommonly airy about the whole thing, "Your playing just reminds me of myself before I started working at it."

"Ah," I say, not sure if that's a compliment or not. Time passes in the deadened air that's peculiar to musical instrument shops the world over. Very unflustered, he inspects his split ends and starts picking at his nails. I become aware that I'm having impressive difficulty opening my mouth and speaking with it, as if I've lost all coordination between my tongue and lips.

"You play pretty well," I venture, carelessly shifting position under the bass guitar, which rumbles through the amplifier like a offended dragon.

"Oh! Thanks! Well, I guess. Hey, let me give you a lesson," he says, and pulls up alongside me. He's just getting started -- "you see, you don't need to put that much pressure on the strings, cause all you need to be doing is making the notes sound" -- when he looks over and exclaims "Oh wow, dude!" [so my dialogue isn't superior] "Your guitar is melting!"

I look down at my left hand and see, quite suddenly, that all of the thick frets set into the neck are peeling and flaking, as if they've been badly electroplated and are now giving up the ghost. As we watch, parts of the fretboard blacken and tarnish, strings suddenly jar as the heavy nickel wrap gives way.

I put it down against the amplifier pretty fast, with a start - bass strings are thick and heavy, and I have no intention of getting hit by one when it snaps - and look back at him. Somehow now I'm standing up. He is confused and somewhat anxious, and so am I.

More time passes. The air-conditioning seems particularly loud.

Somewhat fearfully, I look back at the bass guitar. It looks fine now, although there are still bits of fragmented fretwire and string-wrap scattered under my trainers. I don't feel particularly like picking it up and starting to play again, though. I look around for something to clear it up, but there's nothing around except for little pianos and stands full of sheet music and quietly-humming amplifiers, all on standby with glowing red lights.

"Do you mind if I go now?", I ask him.

"It's okay, man," he says, looking down at his guitar and starting to screw around with something which sounds like it could be Cream, "It's just your head..."